"If there isn't a muse...MANY GENRES ONE CRAFT is surely the next best thing. The contributors know their stuff, and what they're teaching applies to writing at any age. MANY GENRES ONE CRAFT covers all the bases superbly, including issues I haven't seen addressed anywhere else in today's rapidly shifting publishing landscape."
--Renni Browne, co-author of SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS

Friday, October 21, 2011

Plotting your first mystery can seem like an overwhelming prospect. Keeping suspects and clues and red herrings straight is like juggling squirrels. Here is a strategy to help you get all your suspects and clues to line up neatly and perform for you. It won’t give you a great idea, but it will help you turn that great idea into a viable mystery.

First thing you need to do is create your “Mystery Eternal Triangle,” which is different from the romantic one. This triangle consists of the victim, the killer and the sleuth. You can start with any of them, but for this exercise, let’s start with the victim.

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Victoria Thompson writes the Edgar-nominated Gaslight Mystery Series, set in turn-of-the-century New York City and featuring midwife Sarah Brandt and detective Frank Malloy. Her latest book in the series is Murder on Lexington Avenue. She is also the author of 20 historical romances. A popular speaker, Victoria has taught at Penn State University and currently teaches in the Seton Hill University master’s program in writing popular fiction. She is online at http://victoriathompson.com.

Sometimes no matter how vigilant you are, you can't keep loved ones save.

Dana McCluskey and her father know very well that there can be dangers around every corner. They wanted to keep Emmy safe.

But it is impossible to see some dangers coming. And there are those corners that you'd never see, out-of-the-way places just beyond our grasp where loved ones can get very lost — and the danger there is very real indeed.

The Middle Ages have captured the imagination of modern writers and readers more than any other historical period. Just walk through the fiction section of any bookstore and you’ll see evidence of medieval influence—either thrust boldly into your face or working its magic in a more subtle fashion. The fantasy genre owes approximately 90% of its genetic heritage to the tropes, myths, and technology of the European Middle Ages. A turn down the romance aisle will offer you covers filled with fine maidens being wooed by brave knights (or knaves?) because physical attraction and sex haven’t changed much in five hundred years. In the field of mystery, an entire subgenre of medieval whodunits thrives. Even in modern thrillers, a crowded corner of the genre is filled with mysterious Templars and other shadowy enigmas of the period.

The challenge for genre fiction writers is two-fold. First, to understand why this period resonates so well with the modern reader (or perhaps, more importantly, the acquiring editor). Second, to master the period and its constituent elements to allow the reader to taste, smell, and feel the essence of this compelling period in European history.

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Russ Howe is a Canadian barrister and a partner at the law firm of Boland Howe. He is the past president of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association, a member of the Advocates Society, and the Law Society of Upper Canada. Russ has a specialist degree in History from the University of Toronto. He has tested for and attained the rank of Scholar at the Academy of European Martial Arts where he both trains in and teaches multiple forms of medieval combat techniques. Russ is also a member of the Canadian Heraldry Society.

Write what you love. Write what you know. Good advice, right? But for a novice writer who spent her childhood swinging on vines pretending to be Robin Hood, these two tidbits of wisdom set up a frustrating contradiction.

What I loved was historical fantasy, the action-packed kingdom of myth. What I knew was growing up female in a small town in Pennsylvania. Quite a distance to travel as a budding author! So when my first Master’s thesis advisor, Barbara Miller, asked what my novel would be about, I was horrified to hear myself speak honestly and tell her my secret heart's desire: "Gwynhyfar. I want to write a version of the Arthurian legend."

I will be eternally grateful to Barbara for not snorting, "You've got to be kidding!"

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Rachael Pruitt is a writer, storyteller, and teacher with a lifelong fascination for Celtic mythology and the Arthurian legend. Her Arthurian poetry has been published in Paradox magazine (2008 and 2009) and she has just completed her first Arthurian novel, The Dragon's Harp, a retelling of Gwynhyfar's coming-of-age. Currently an English as a Second Language teacher, Rachael has also published nonfiction articles detailing "Myths for Our Time", a personal mythology process she developed while an Artist in Residence in the Pacific Northwest.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

The resurgence of steampunk has left writers scrambling to don brass goggles and set off into the heavens in steam-powered dirigibles. But before tripping blindly over the first clockwork cliché that comes to mind, novices to the genre would do well to survey its founding works and influences:

The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
The invention of a mechanical computer takes Victorian London by storm.

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
Professor Brendan Doyle travels from 1983 to 1810, where he runs afoul of a secret society whose failed attempt to oust the British from Egypt has unlocked the time-gates.

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Christopher Paul Carey holds an M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. He is the co-author with Philip José Farmer of The Song of Kwasin, the final novel in the Khokarsa trilogy, the author of short stories and essays in various anthologies, and the editor of three fiction collections. Chris lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Laura, where he works as an editor at Paizo Publishing. Visit his website and blog at www.cpcarey.com.

Within these pages you will find the things that not only go bump in the night, but bring fear to the things that do the bumping. Discover your new favorite authors and let your mind wander and wonder how 66 simple words put together in the optimum use of fright can have such an impact on your slumber. Join us....

Many stories of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (GA) promised utopia—gleaming futures with flying cars, pristine cities, and Three-Lawed robots. Characters flew off to work with personal jet packs, enjoyed disease-free lives, and took nourishment from meals-in-a-pill. GA writings were mainly consigned to pulp magazines, kept safely away from "serious literature," and made to languish in the science fiction ghetto. Then rebellion hit, in a movement called the New Wave. New Wave science fiction writers mocked the GA tropes and experimented with taboo subjects such as sex, politics, the distrust of man’s superior intellect and the decline of society. They also brought science fiction into the literary mainstream with an attention to style not witnessed in the pulps, and a focus on inner man, not outer space. This New Wave rode the trend of postmodernism, which challenged and rejected the mores and principles of established culture. However, as the New Wave genre was subsumed into the mainstream, the rebellion lost steam. But as rebellions are wont to do, this one did not disappear, it merely changed form. Enter cyberpunk.

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K. Ceres Wright is a writer and editor for a management consulting firm. Her story, "The Haunting of M117," appears in Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Book 1. Her poem, Doomed, was nominated for a Rhysling award. She lives in Maryland with her son, Ian, and daughter, Chloe.

From the flames of tragedy, a hero rises! In the roaring heart of the crucible, steel is made. In the raging flame of personal tragedy, men are sometimes forged into something more than human. Life was bliss for millionaire adventurer Richard Henry Benson until the fateful day crime and greed took away his wife and daughter and turned him into something more than human. Driven by loss, compelled by grief, The Avenger is a chilled impersonal force of justice, more machine than man, dedicated to the destruction of evildoers everywhere. This collection features new prose stories of The Avenger by such luminaries as Will Murray, Christopher Paul Carey, Robin W. Bailey, Matthew Baugh, Joe Gentile, Paul Kupperberg, Howard Hopkins, Mark Ellis, Ron Fortier, and David Michelinie.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Description in science fiction does not describe as much as create. All description does this to a certain extent, encouraging--intentionally or not—a reader’s creative interaction that makes a place or object "one’s own." This identification with, participation in, and ownership of characters or settings is crucial for reader enjoyment, and for selling the book. "I felt I was there" and "It seemed so real" are phrases spoken by satisfied buyers. In mainstream prose, or in genres focused on contemporary settings, identification can happen easily because of the usual familiarity of place. But for SF’s unreal locations, unknown planets, interstellar vistas postulated from scientific parameters, or "worlds beyond space and time," reader participation can be more challenging. So the test of much SF description is not in the accuracy of reproduction, which often can’t be measured, but in how far the reader can be led to half create and then to enter imaginary realms.

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Dr. Albert Wendland grew up in the Pittsburgh area, attending both Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. At CMU, he majored in physics with the intention of going on into astronomy and writing science fiction in his off-time. He soon pursued a Ph.D. in English literature instead and has been teaching at Seton Hill ever since. Al is now the director of the Writing Popular Fiction MFA Program. His publications range from magazine and journal articles to poetry and short stories, as well as the non-fiction book Science, Myth, and the Fictional Creation of Alien Worlds published by UMI Research Press. He currently has a Science Fiction novel he’s shopping around.